Wild Horses (38 page)

Tom caught each wrist and restrained them in the air, until she relented and remembered who she was and why, and that he wasn’t blameless, but he was hers if she wanted.

And she did. For tonight and tomorrow and the next day, she did. Her fists unclenched and when he let her go she sank atop him, let him hold her, cheek to chest.

“I’m sorry. I woke up, I was … confused,” she said. “I can’t promise it’ll never happen again.”

“I know. So what are you trying to do, anyway?” He laughed with soft reluctance. “Give me gray hairs?”

They coiled like this for a time, listening to the silence of night and the wet earth. Finally, sensing the imminence of sleep, Allison slid from him so that they might sleep unentangled. She’d felt last night, in the bunkhouse, how unaccustomed Tom was to spending a night with someone in the same bed.

And sometime later she touched his turned back, lightly, with the tips of her fingers, feeling him tighten in response. She knew that no good could come of it, but had to ask anyway:

“When I got sick today, when I had to go running off to the bathroom,” she said. “Did he say much of anything? Did he beg? Because he’s such a manipulator, you know, I recognize that now that I’m older. But I need to know. What did he say to you?”

“You couldn’t hear anything from in there?”

“Voices. Just voices. No words, really, just … voices.”

Tom was silent for a long time, long enough for her to wonder if he’d not fallen asleep. Finally, “It wasn’t much. He asked me if I’d ever killed anyone before. I don’t know how, but he seemed to guess I’d been in the military, so maybe that’s what gave him the idea. Asked me if I’d ever killed anyone.”

He’s lying,
she thought.
He’s lying.

“How did you answer that?”

“I told him I had.”

“That’s not true, is it?” Thinking of the wife, the embryo, that she wasn’t even supposed to know about. “It wasn’t true?”

“I don’t know,” said Tom, from beside her and from far away. “I wish I could be sure. I think I must have. But I don’t know.”

She touched her lips between his shoulder blades, over the knobs of spine; tasted the salt of his skin. “I don’t think you did,” she told him. “I would’ve seen it in your eyes. So let it go if you can. Let it go, for me. Because I don’t think you did.”

Awake in the night, she remembered some story she’d heard of the creation of the world, some other culture’s lesser-known ideas on God and the beginning of human affairs. Persian, maybe, Allison couldn’t remember, but in their eyes God was a far more pragmatic sort than the white-bearded, thundering meddler she’d grown up learning to live in terror of. Perhaps more like the capricious playwright she imagined now.

Adam and Eve, there they had been at the dawn of time, as God had shown them the Garden of Eden and all its splendors, but at no time was any mention made of fruit and taboos.

“Take what you want,” this God told them, “and pay for it.”

While Allison preferred to think of it all beginning this way, better by far than blaming serpents, she recognized how much more subtly devious it was at heart. For while you could take only once, the terms and currency of payment were never-ending.

We took today for ourselves and we have tonight,
she thought, the last thoughts before sleep.
And if we start paying tomorrow, I guess that won’t be too soon.

CHAPTER 23

Midnight came and went, taking with it the last of Gunther’s hope that they might get this situation mopped up tonight.

“What’s keeping those two, anyhow? I can’t believe this, we beat them here by an entire day, and we’re the ones got our faces on billboards, just about.” Gunther scowled with ill intent and disgust for humanity. “Some people, they got no concept of the importance of time.”

“Importance of time?” Madeline rolled her eyes. “Oh, that’s rich, coming from a man whose foreplay technique has sunk to the phrase ‘Aren’t you wet yet?’”

“Would you get off of that? Once. I said it
once
.” Gunther quit pacing and swung around, shotgun and all, to explain himself to this cousin of Allison’s, this Constance person, as she cowered in the upstairs hallway corner. “I was feeling a modicum of stress last night, so maybe I was a little impatient. Now I’m supposed to hear about this the rest of the year?” To Madeline, then, who sat on the floor with her back to the blue-papered wall: “I know what your match is in the animal kingdom now. You’re an oyster. Just like an oyster. Get one grain of sand in you, and you work that thing and work it until you got a pearl as big as a jawbreaker up your ass.”

Maddy didn’t bat an eye, just smirked. “Which explains why a day with you is like a day at the beach.”

“What a mouth you got on you.” He turned again to the cousin. “You. You’re native southern, right, you got that accent? Maybe you could give this ballbuster of mine lessons. Southern women are sweet to their men, right? Stand by them, don’t always talk such trash to their men? Think you could give her some pointers?”

She appeared not to have heard him. Her eyes were red-rimmed in darkened hollows, and she sat in the corner with her knees hugged up against her chest. Her short brown hair had, over the course of the day, become a tangled mop.

“May I please see my kids one more time tonight?” she asked, in a steady voice that did not match her eyes. The begging she’d gotten out of her system hours earlier. “I just want to make sure they’re sleeping sound and all.”

Gunther saw no harm in it, if it would keep her calm. He nodded, and Maddy picked up the Browning and escorted her down the hall, to a door across whose top half was taped a misty-toned poster of a prancing unicorn, hooking a rainbow with its horn.

The second floor had become everyone’s temporary home in case some nosy neighbor happened to come along and take a look through a first-floor window. The layout proved more functional as well, bedrooms and bathroom branching off a hall that was wood-floored along each side, with a thread-worn runner of blue floral carpeting anchored down the middle. The consolidation was ideal, no one more than three seconds from either end of the shotgun.

The kids they’d confined to the girl’s room. Lainie was five and Randy two, neither old enough to wholly grasp the situation, and the cousin had so far been able to keep them convinced it was some sort of game. Earlier, their curious faces peered from the doorway, as though trusting that their mother was still in charge, even if they’d not yet figured out all the rules. What they probably wondered most was why their dad wasn’t playing.

Gunther had checked the guy an hour ago. Still out of it, in a bad way. Unemployed slob, the man had no pride, nor any worth to his life beyond insurance policies, so far as Gunther could tell. Sitting on his fat can watching TV talk shows when the cousin had let them into the house this afternoon, he’d looked as useless as a ruptured appendix. While Madeline, in her blond wig and casino blazer, pretended to be from a real estate agency and spun her lie about representing a buyer interested in the acquirability of the house, Gunther had picked up a train engine made of cherry-wood and walloped the slug across the head. In hindsight, the next several blows might have been above and beyond, but the man’s existence — like that of all the deadbeats from whom he’d collected over the years — was so loathsome that Gunther couldn’t contain himself.

An hour ago, still constricted by the rug in which Gunther had wrapped him in the event of his waking up with heroic notions, Jefferson Wainright’s left pupil was fixed and dilated.

Yet for all that, he still looked better than Boyd.

The unicorn girl’s door reopened and Madeline returned the cousin to her place in the corner at the opposite end of the hall. The cousin thanked them, calling them “sir” and “ma’am”, then sank back to the floor, where she fixed her gaze on the unicorn. They’d decided that she, unlike Boyd and the hooker, needed no rope from the utility room to keep her restrained. So long as she stayed in their sight, the cousin posed no threat, for fear of endangering the kids, and it was vital she remain free to maintain illusions, in case someone came to the door or she had to answer the phone.

“Won’t either one of us be much good tomorrow, we don’t get some sleep,” he said to Madeline. “Who goes first, you or me?”

“Last time he asked me that,” she told the cousin, “he was talking about orgasm.”

“I never said that!” Gunther cried. “I never once said that!”

“Oh, calm down, you big baby.” Madeline tickled a fingernail along the length of his jaw. “Can’t you tell I’m only teasing?”

He nuzzled the stiff copper of her hair. “All I can say is, there’s a fine line between teasing and all-out, trash-talking nastiness, and in you that line’s gotten awful blurry.”

“Blurrier by the day, too,” she said. “Get some sleep, I’ll be fine. But before you dirty up my pillow, go wash yourself and put down a towel to sleep on. Your hair’s running again.”

He left her the shotgun, along with the Browning he’d given her earlier, after going out at dusk to search the coral Mazda and park it behind the house. Its glove compartment had returned to him the Glock that Boyd had taken from him Saturday. So happy was Gunther to see it again that he kissed its hard polymer skin. Add to this the Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolver he’d found in the master bedroom and they were set up better than ever for truculence.

Gunther brushed his teeth with one of the kids’ toothbrushes, scrubbed away the latest trickles from his jet-black hair. Caper of his life, and he was a human inkwell.

When he stepped back into the hall, he saw that Maddy was sitting on the floor with the Browning in one hand and, with the other, turning pages in the photo album she’d packed for the trip. He hadn’t even known it existed, much less that she’d brought it, until running across the thing by accident two nights ago, while lying low in western Louisiana. He sensed that it was nothing he’d been meant to find, ever, making no mention of it, keeping it to himself while wishing, even though he’d never been one given to regrets, that he had moved to Las Vegas years earlier.

He went to stretch out on the bed, and didn’t interrupt her.

As a last act, Gunther paged through his well-worn dictionary and stabbed a random finger into the P’s. “Propinquity,” he read, then decided it was a silly word and he wanted nothing to do with it, and he yawned, and in the last few instants before dozing off, he heard Boyd again, groaning on the other side of the wall.

*

In the years when her faith in most things meant to sustain hope began to crumble, Madeline supposed that belief in miracles had been the earliest to go. Maybe she’d been hasty, for a miracle was the only thing that could’ve gotten her and Gunther this far.

They had fled that Texas diner hoping the lack of witnesses would get them down the road before anyone knew what to look for. They’d assumed that, despite Allison’s refusal to stick around, she and Thomas St. John would be calling the law the first chance they got, but would at least call believing all that was needed was to swing by for a simple arrest. Under such an impression, why bother giving descriptions for a manhunt?

Madeline had worn the blond wig, driving from the parking lot in the car of a dead man. They switched plates several miles away, then to another car entirely when they could. Enduring the hours of slow roast with a bottle of water and towels soaked through in a gas station sink, Gunther had ridden for most of the afternoon and evening — and through two roadblocks — in the stifling oven of each trunk, after first shooting in a few discreet airholes.

Throughout her solitary hours of driving she replayed it over and over: Gunther in his armored vest, striding with the shotgun toward the diner, wading through the man left to guard them, then disappearing within. She’d stood outside in the heat and dust, listening to the rolling boom of the shotgun, and during those eighty seconds of blood and smoke and thunder had come the certain knowledge that her life had ceased to resemble anything it had been before, with no going back, and that she would miss none of it.

Stolen cars and black dye for Gunther and back roads and idle hours hidden in copses of trees listening to a police band scanner and dim motels far off the beaten path — this was not the good life but it was better than it had been, for what had been was but a sad, pale remnant of what had been long before that.

In the hallway floor of the Wainright house, Madeline turned another album page, to examine the evidence for herself.

“What is it there you’re looking at?” Constance asked. The hostage hoping to ingratiate herself with the holder, perhaps. “Is it pictures of your kids? Do you have kids?”

“I have a daughter. Tiffany.” Madeline closed the album. “But these were all taken before I had her.”

“How old is she?” The awful thing was, Constance appeared to genuinely want to know.

“None of your business.” Very firm on that. “She hasn’t been in my life now for a while. That’s better for both of us.”

“Don’t be so sure. Little girls need their mothers even if they turn up their noses sometimes and go wrapping their daddies around their little fingers. They need us.” Constance nodded down at the photo album. “May I see that, would you mind?”